Processing and analysis techniques for continental scale radar maps of the tropical forest

Abstract

A new avenue for radar mapping of the tropical forest at continental scale was recently proposed in the context of the European TREES (TRopical Ecosystem Environment monitoring by Satellites) project. The related issues ask for suitable approaches in the processing and analysis phases, which are the main focus of this paper. Some engineering aspects of the processing chain are described. Next the problem of information extraction from the mosaic with respect to the TREES thematic objectives is tackled. A first research topic is the ability to extract multi-scale structures of the tropical forest. The analysis was done using a technique based on the wavelet transform.